land area of Michigan, Wisconsin, and the part of 

 Minnesota not natural prairie a total forested area of 

 approximately 112 million acres. Lumbering and the 

 clearing- of land for cultivation have reduced the 

 merchantable forest cover to little, if any, more than 

 24,000,000 acres, about 58 per cent in farm woodlots 

 of relatively small timber, commonly second growth, 

 and 42 per cent in commercial timber tracts, in many 

 cases already culled of their choicest trees. A very 

 large part of the once heavily timbered land, about 

 20,000,000 acres, is now fire-swept and devastated 

 sand plain and swamp, much of it with little or no 

 promise of reproduction. 



The original white pine stand of the Lake States 

 has been estimated by Dr. B. E. Fernow at not less 

 than 350,000,000,000 board feet. After less than a 

 century of lumbering, fire, and settlement, only about 

 8,000,000,000 feet of white and Norway pine remain, 

 largely in Minnesota. In 1918 the reported cut of 

 white pine in the Lake States exceeded a billion feet. 

 Another decade will see the practical exhaustion of 

 thier commercial supplies of white pine. 



Lower Peninsula of Michigan. The depletion of 

 commercial timber has proceeded furthest in the 

 Low T er Peninsula of Michigan, where less than a 

 million (probably not much over half a million) 

 acres of hardwoods and hemlock remain. The hun- 

 dreds of large sawmills that once operated had fallen 

 off in 1918 to about 45 that cut more than 1,000,000 

 board feet apiece. The number is rapidly becoming 

 smaller, and within five years there will hardly be a 

 half dozen large mills left. The exhaustion of the re- 



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